Cowboy Bebop: Amused to Death
by Jack HawksmoorA
Summary: Finished at last! Spike and the crew race to find Barrett before he completes the deal for Twist...or dies.
1. Part 1

Cowboy Bebop: Amused to Death 

(Cowboy Bebop and all characters are c) 2000 Sunrise Inc. This story is set between episode #14, "Bohemian Rhapsody" and Episode # 15, "My Funny Valentine". Dedicated to Donna, Maggie, Leanne, Eoin, and Debbie)

Part One:

The décor was strictly late Twentieth Century, the kind of retro-furnishings that tended to crop up every few years like some sort of memetic plague, sweeping through those with shallow, fragile minds like a storm across the Martian plains. It was usually only basic furnishings, Christian Barrett mused as he tiptoed around the living room of the small apartment down in one of the federal districts, where the Martian Government sent their bureaucrats to retire. Invariably, the illusion faded as signs of modernity, for lack of a better term, crept in around the edges. Here, in an entertainment center designed to hold electronic media long extinct, one could find the control deck for an Afterglow Multimedia VR cortical stimulator, the latest thing for jaded entertainment junkies. Christian looked over his shoulder at the owners of the apartment, a man, thin, small in build, nearly bald, and his wife, who was overweight to the point that she seemed to serve as the universe's natural counterpoint to her husband. He knew their names-he knew everything that the Martian federal network had on them-but he found that he did not care. They had a purpose, after all. Both of them wore liquid crystal VR lozenges over their eyes, wireless links to the stimulator that jacked them directly in to Afterglow's proprietary virtual dataspace, and both sat, slumped in their chairs in the position that one associated with stupor. Christian smiled, an expression made all the more predatory by the black slashes of tattoos that scarred both his cheeks from ear to chin, two slashes per side. "Amazing what you can do with a little promotion," he whispered to himself. He reached into the pocket of the black leather jacket that he wore and produced a small device, about the size of a palm top computer, and rested it beside of the stimulator. He touched the icons on the face of the screen, and the device did its job, intercepting the two-way data flow between the users and the stimulator, seeking the medical data that told the stimulator the state of the user's brain. It took a moment, and then a series of images appeared on the tiny screen. Few people could even grasp that they'd seen anything as fast as the views had appeared, yet Christian had seen it all. Views of the areas in each user's cortex stimulated by the program, reflex response, signal phase distortions-and all were in the green as far as Christian was concerned. "Very good," he said to himself, pocketing the palm-top. He turned and looked at the old couple and wondered if, the experiment over, he should release these two. Then he laughed. "Let 'em fry," he whispered, and walked out of the apartment.

The street below was quiet at 1:45 AM, as befitted a neighborhood with an average citizen age of sixty-seven, the only sound the distant hum of vehicles driving through the adjoining neighborhood, Akiyama District. Christian wondered at the irony of city planning that had placed the retirement community next to a district long plagued by prostitution and juvenile crime. He supposed it was some sort of karmic balance. Waiting outside for him, standing astride a BMW/Viggen hybrid motorcycle, was a girl, Eurasian as they'd called people of her heritage once, wearing a school uniform, the pleated skirt criminally short, and thigh-high stockings. Tattooed on her left cheek was an ankh, the symbol given to her, as the facial scars had been given to Christian, the day she had joined the Practical Nihilists. She called herself Toxic Dancer, but Christian knew her real name. It delighted him in a perverse way that he knew this secret about her. "How did it go, Painful?" she asked.

Christian smiled a death's head smile. He had taken the gang handle of Painful Death out of a sense of crushing irony if nothing else and it amused him to be called that. "How do you think? Two users, brains turned to goo. They say the dataspace rots your brain."

Dancer shook her head. "You know what I mean. Did they download Twist?"

"Your doubts wound me."

"I'm serious, Painful. You know we're running out of time, right? Herron's put a twenty million bounty on your head."

Christian stepped closer to Dancer and cupped her chin in one hand. "Sweet Dancer, do you think I'm worried about a bounty hunter, given what Esperanza wants to do to me?" He gave her a light kiss. "Yes, they downloaded Twist. It had the full effect through the Afterglow servers. We can put it on the market."

"Esperanza won't like that," she pointed out.

"He needed to make a higher bid." He nodded at the motorcycle. "Let's get back to Akiyama, start making some calls. Tomorrow will be a busy day." Dancer nodded, and kissed him again before putting her helmet on. Barrett looked up at the apartment building that he had just left and wondered if the universe realized what had just happened today. Then he climbed on behind her and rode into the night.

Spaceship _Bebop_, in the hyperspace gateway from Ganymede to Mars:

Spike Spiegel was pretty sure that, no matter how long he kept his eyes closed, Jet Black would still be standing there, impatiently waiting for him to see what was on the monitor.

He had already leaned back on the couch once, "accidentally" knocking the monitor aside, in the hopes that Jet would catch on that he was not interested in the bounty that had caught Jet's eye, but Jet had calmly replaced the monitor in its location and had waited, arms crossed. "You aren't going anywhere, are you?" Spike asked.

"Not until you look at this," Jet admitted.

"And if I don't look at it?"

Jet looked over his shoulder at the hatchway that led to the crew quarters of the _Bebop _and said "I'm sure Faye wouldn't mind looking at a twenty million bounty."

Spike sighed. He had a good idea of which bounty Jet was talking about-twenty million was a fairly high bounty-and was decidedly uninterested in pursuing it. However, he was equally opposed to the idea of letting Faye Valentine have it. Not only would Faye lord it over him-she was rather good at that- but she would lose it in a hurry gambling, or incurring some other debt that would eventually draw him and Jet into the fray. "What exactly fired you up about this one, Jet. We could take four bounties that would make that on Mars easy."

"It's a corporate bounty," Jet replied.

"Which is why we shouldn't take it," Spike said. "Whenever corporations put a bounty on someone, they either welsh out of it or it's to try to cover up some kind of bullshit internal politics. No sane bounty hunter would touch it…"

"Which makes it perfect. We haven't exactly been rolling in the big scores lately."

"You'll have to remind me when we were rolling them in." Spike opened one eye and looked up at Jet. "What got you so hot for this one, Jet?"

"Maybe I'm tired of making so little that we can barely pay the Gate toll to move on to the next score."

Spike smiled. "Just trying to shed that lovable loser image, huh, Jet?" He opened his eyes and sat up. "The Jet Black self-improvement plan. How can I refuse an offer like that?"

"Shut up, Spike." 

Before Spike could read what was on the monitor in full, Edward, the gawky, eccentric radical hacker, burst into the room, chasing after Ein. The little Welsh corgi wasn't exactly built for high speed sprinting, and Spike suspected that Edward took it easy on him for that reason. She-it was hard to tell, with her wild, unusual looks, that Edward was a girl-chased Ein past the couch, then stopped on a dime and stared at the monitor. "Oooh, a bountyhead. Edward must look."

"Knock it off, Edward." Spike settled in to read the profile, knowing Edward would do the same and realizing that he might as well not try to stop her. "Let's see-Christian Xian Barrett, twenty years old, five-ten, one hundred seventy eight pounds, distinguishing characteristics, four tattoos on face….whoa." The picture of the dark haired young man was marred by two slashes on each cheek that resembled open scars. "This guy's in a style gang."

"Style gang?" Edward climbed on the arm of the couch and perched there, like a bird. "Edward does not know the term."

"Style gang. Kind of a Martian tradition. Juvenile gangs will pick one fashion or personal philosophy and build a gang around it. Facial tattoos are big with style gangs." Spike read the remainder of the profile on Barrett and found he was a bit surprised by it. "Employed as a researcher in applied virtual reality programming skills for the past seven years by Afterglow LLC? This guy?"

Jet nodded. "I pulled his public jacket from the Afterglow database earlier. He's a serious prodigy, discovered at the age of thirteen writing programs that researchers twice his age could not even imagine. He invented the programming language that made the current trend of direct cortical stimulation possible."

"Come again?" Spike asked.

"You don't get out much, do you Spike?" Jet nodded at the monitor. "This guy made it possible for Afterglow to develop their new system, the one that allows for true virtual reality interfacing with full sense simulation. It's the latest fad."

"I don't do fads." Spike reached into a pocket of his jacket and produced a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. "So what did this guy do anyway?"

"Afterglow doesn't want to admit it. But the fact that they put a bounty on his head is rather suggestive, don't you think. Usually, with corporate bounties, that means it has something to do with the bottom line."

Spike lit a cigarette as Edward, apparently bored with what she was watching, decided to chase Ein again. "Anything else on him?"

"Yeah. Apparently he's still active in the gang culture. The Afterglow brass tolerated it because of his talent, but he still has associations with a lot of the style gangs."

"That will mean Akiyama District, then. Rough neck of the woods." Spike tried not to think about his life on Mars, before, but Akiyama District had a reputation that was hard to forget. "Sounds like a bit much, even for twenty million. But we'd better take it…right, Faye?"

Jet looked around, confused, as he could not see anyone there. Finally, Faye Valentine stuck her head around the edge of the hatchway and asked "How did you know, Spike?"

Spike smiled. "I didn't. Just wanted to be sure you weren't spying."

Faye walked into the room with her accustomed confident strut, clearly playing off the fact that Spike had outwitted her. "Whatever. How are we going to get this one?"

"We?" Jet asked. "So we're a 'we' now, Faye?"

"For twenty million we are." She walked over to the monitor and read the screen. "Doesn't look like he's worth twenty million."

"I wasn't aware that there was an industry standard," Jet growled.

"Aren't we grouchy today?" Faye looked up at Jet and smiled sweetly. "Wake up on the wrong side of the bed?"

Spike decided to put a stop to the latest installation of the Valentine-Black verbal wars before they started again. "Okay, kids, don't make me put you to bed without your supper. Jet, you work this guy's background when we get to Mars-I'll take Akiyama District."

"And, uh, what about me?" Faye asked, tapping her foot impatiently.

Spike stood up and began to leave the room, his hands in his jacket pockets, walking in his traditional slouch. "I'm going to get the Swordfish ready. Feel free to follow me if you want, Faye." 

"Your trust in my abilities overwhelms me," Faye scoffed. She looked the profile on Barrett over again, thinking. A corporate bounty. We must really be desperate to take this one. The proud crew of the _Bebop_, reduced to this. "Well, who knows," she said to herself. "We might actually get this one." 

On the other side of the room, Ed crashed headlong into a wall trying to catch Ein; she shook her head, said "Ouchies," then continued chasing the dog. Jet watched her go with a certain species of amazement, wondering exactly how her head worked. "That child is not right," he remarked.

"Who's right on this bucket of bolts?" Faye asked. "Well, better go down to the hangar and preflight my little Redtail." 

"So you're going to follow Spike's lead for a change?"

Faye looked back over her shoulder at Jet. "Well, you know how I like to play the long odds, don't you?"

"Ain't that the truth."

Mars, Akiyama District:

Christian awoke at precisely 6:00 AM local time, his left arm numb because Dancer had fallen asleep next to him and had rolled onto his arm. He was not certain if they had made love, but given their mutual nudity it had a high probability. They had returned to the converted warehouse that the Nihilists had purchased using money that he had funneled from one of Afterglow's black program budgets and Dancer, after a few drinks and some of her preferred designer drugs, had gotten sentimental. Christian, himself more than a little drunk, had agreed to it if only as a study in semantics, on how the word "love" meant different things based on the dynamic of the situation, but he couldn't quite recall how the argument had gone. He pulled his arm out from under Dancer, who mumbled something and rolled over. Christian pulled on the same pair of pants that he had worn the day before and walked across the room to the table that his custom built computer sat on. He booted it up and called up, once again, the source code for his greatest creation, Twist. Millions of lines of code flowed up the monitor in an endless stream of data that, soon, would change the human universe. If it was allowed to. He called up a mail program and checked his in-box, and found that there was no new mail from Herron. He's relying on bounty hunters, then? Christian thought. He needs to worry more about the competition, or doing the job himself. 

Christian picked up from beside the computer a pair of VR goggles, an older iteration, wired to the computer as opposed to the wireless links Afterglow promoted now, plugged them in, and placed them over his eyes. Instantly his mind lit up with a million icons representing the data paths through the dataspaces of Mars, routes that he preferred to travel highlighted in green. Barrett ignored them and took a road less traveled, finding himself in front of the representation of the private dataspace of the third party that he intended to involve in this affair, the one that, he hoped, would draw Keith Herron out of his defensive posture, which he needed to have happen.

The dataspace was designed to resemble something out of Japanese architecture, suggesting several different buildings at once, fitting for the president of an electronics firm that had had it's start in Tokyo. Barrett reached out and touched the icon, and left the message that the owner of the dataspace was waiting for. "This is Barrett, Mr. Misawa. I'm ready for the meeting now. Club Gothic Slam, midnight tonight." He doubted that Toshiaki Misawa would even bother to come himself, but that wasn't the intent. Afterglow's comp-sci division had hacked this message hub months ago, and right now alarms were ringing in the Afterglow system. Mass mayhem will erupt tonight, he thought as he logged out. Assuming that I live that long. He watched the lines of code that defined his creation for a long time after that, wondering if things were going to work out the way he wanted them to. They seldom did.

A knock came at his door, and before he could answer, the door opened. Standing there was a tall, powerfully built man with a blonde crew cut and tattoos that resembled jagged bolts of lightning running from temple to jaw. Silent Fury had been the leader of the Nihilists before Christian had come along, supplanting him with his resources within Afterglow, and in truth, Christian allowed Fury to run the gang for him. He was not certain exactly how much Fury resented him for it, but was certain that he did. "We getting it on tonight?" Fury asked gruffly.

"High probability. It's likely to get messy-if I were you I wouldn't bring anyone you're fond of."

"You contacted Misawa then?"

Christian nodded. "The trick to successful negotiations is to make sure that you have options. If Herron and Afterglow don't want to play, we bring in another player."

"And Esperanza?"

"Is a cut-rate thug who hopes that the Red Dragons don't notice his business. He thought he could break their monopoly on the Red-eye trade with me. It doesn't work that way."

Fury considered this. "So tonight we could see two different corporate security teams and possibly Esperanza's muscle. Painful, how many ways are you trying to get people to kill you?"

Christian's expression was unreadable. "As many as it takes to make me rich, Fury. As many as it takes."

The _Bebop_ made planetfall, as was Jet's custom, in the water of the artificial bay that surrounded the main Martian settlement, which was in keeping with the ship's origin as a fishing trawler. As soon as the Bebop had come to a stop, the hangar bay doors opened and Spike's personal craft, the sleek, angular Swordfish, moved into launch position. Spike extended the wings, fired up the engines, and said to himself "Here we go again" and launched himself into the sky. Moments later, Faye's Redtail, a less-aerodynamic looking craft, basically a cockpit with a wide variety of weapons built around it, followed. Spike, watching his screens, grinned to himself. "Such loyalty," he said.

"All right, guys," Jet called to both of them, "Ed and me will try to hack the Afterglow system and find out just why Barrett has a bounty on him. Spike, can I assume you have a reason for going to Akiyama District?"

"I'm not going to Akiyama," Spike replied. "Going to pay an old friend a visit first."

"Spike has friends," Faye called, incredulously. "Who would have guessed?"

"Funny, Faye. Remind me to laugh later. No, this person used to run the gangs before they got old enough for it to be boring. She might be able to tell me what's up, though-she liked to keep an eye on the street."

"Hmm, Spike, a 'she?' Old girlfriend?"

Spike decided to let that one pass.

One of the greater difficulties in owning a flying vehicle as your main form of transport was the fact that, in built up urban areas, it was difficult to find a place to land. Spike and Faye had been forced to land twenty blocks north of their goal and walk back through one of the business districts, skyscrapers rising into the twilight above them. Faye, typically, was complaining. "I knew I should have made my own leads," she grumbled. "But no, I have to follow your sorry ass all over hell's half acre."

"You could leave you know," he told her. "I don't need your help here."

"And miss out on some more of the famous past of Spike Spiegel?" Faye laughed, "Wouldn't dream of it."

"I knew you'd say that," Spike complained.

Spike led Faye to a small store built between two larger skyscrapers almost like an afterthought, identified by the small neon sign in the window as being called "Modern Electronics." Spike pushed open the front door and was nearly knocked back out of the store by a blast of noise that he thought was music. "Hasn't changed a bit," he said to himself, walking in. The store sold second hand electronics-computers, VR sets, playback units-and the owner and operator sat behind the counter, listening to the ear-blasting, guitar driven music while working on a computer. She was a very pretty girl, in her early twenties, still had the same red streaks dyed into her long black hair as before. Some things do stay the same, he thought. He walked up to the counter and said over the music "What do they call this music again Donna?" 

If Spike had expected her to act shocked at his presence, Donna amazed him. "I told you years ago it was called alternative, Spike." 

"Alternative to what?"

"You never did listen did you?" Donna looked up and noticed Faye. "And this is?"

"My personal fan club," he said, a comment that caused Faye to make a face at him. "So, Donna, things still the same with you?"

"Depends on how you define 'same", Spike. Obviously I'm not quite the woman I used to be." She held up her hand and showed him the ring on her finger "Got married."

"To a lucky guy. You still keep up with the street?"

"Half my business is street still, Spike. People wanting modified hardware or something rare and I'm their girl. So what do you need to know?"

"There's a style gang with connections to Afterglow LLC down in Akiyama. Know which one it is?"

"That's easy. The Practical Nihilists. Some Afterglow employee took over the gang about six months back and since then things have been weird. Rumor has it that there's a lot of noise about how Painful Death-that's the Afterglow employee-is trying to make some big score with the Esperanza mob, and of course there's the bounty." Donna cocked an eyebrow at him. "That's what you want, right? I'd heard that these days you were a bounty hunter."

"Word travels fast. The Esperanza mob, huh? Still tired of being number two to the Red Dragons in the criminal fraternity." What would a crime lord want with a virtual reality programmer? Spike thought. "They have any preferred hang out?" 

"Gothic Slam. A retro-metal club down in Akiyama. But unless you're in a gang, or invited, you don't get in there." 

"I think I can handle that, Donna. Well, thanks for everything." He turned and walked for the door, waving over his shoulder. "Be good."

"Try to be, Spike."

"So, Spike, " Faye asked once they were outside the store, "who was she before?"

Spike lit a cigarette. "One of a million kids in a gang that the Red Dragons used for their own purposes. She's rather good at building electronics, and that's what she did. One day she woke up and was tired of it and she got out. One of the few who did."

"I see. So how do we get into this club?"

Spike looked Faye over. "Well, normally I would recommend using some of your assets, but gang bangers like their girls a bit less demure than you." Given that Faye was wearing her customary outfit of very short shorts and a halter-top in a rather bright yellow, this seemed unbelievable. "Don't worry, I'll take care of it."

"You are so well known here, after all."

The _Bebop:_

Ed, sitting cross-legged in front of her computer, was starting to get impressed. 

She liked a challenge, to be sure, and Afterglow's corporate security arm's computer security was serious, radical in fact. She had hacked her way into the majority of the system with ease, but the gateway to the records division was a nasty one. Ed raised her hands over her head and intoned loudly "This will be the one that does it!" She hit a key, and one of her standard intrusion codes, represented in VR space by a series of smiley face icons, was inputted into the code field-and promptly got an "access denied" message as a response. "Oooh, a tough nut to crack, " she said in a singsong voice. On the other side of the room, Jet, who had been trying to get information on Barrett from the police database, looked up in disbelief. He wondered if Ed was really having trouble or just playing a game with the system. Usually did not take her this long, he mused.

Ed was in fact deadly serious, as she proved as far as she was concerned when she shouted "Time to worship the Green Grin!" She pulled out her deadliest code pattern, one written in a series of smilies that were green, grinning madly at the viewer. "Okay, Green Grin, go get 'em!"

In computing terms, what Ed's code did was roughly equivalent to a mugging, as she basically battered her way in. She launched another code to repair the damage that she had made as she headed for the data on Christian Xian Barrett that Jet needed. "Pay allegiance to the Green Grin, " she cackled, which made Jet wonder exactly what Ed was up to. Once inside the system, finding what they needed was easy, and Ed downloaded a rather considerable file then left, still laughing. "Got it, got it, got it," she said, capering around. "Wanna see?" Before Jet could answer positively, Ed put her computer on her head and walked over to where Jet was working. Jet took the computer from it's rather precariously position and began to read. "Let's see what we have here...Christian Barrett, head researcher, Project Twist." Jet read on and found that it was mostly technobabble about the goals of the project that Barrett had been working on.

"Enhanced emulation of cortical stimulation in terms of chemical balance," he read. "What does that mean?"

Ed peered over his shoulder and said, "Ooh, he's a naughty boy."

"What do you mean, Edward?"

"Read it…." She scrolled the report down, having speed-read the file's summary letter when she was on-line. "He stole it…. Stole all the work and took off. "

Jet read on further and found that Ed was correct. Barrett, who was already under suspicion of embezzling funds from the Twist budget, had taken three years or research and all of his security codes and had disappeared-to an extent. In the file were transcripts of phone and e-mail communications to the CEO of Afterglow LLC, Keith Herron, that were obviously attempts by Barrett to sell his work back to Herron. Jet smiled; he could almost admire the kid's style. "But what did he steal?"

"You don't know?" Ed peered into Jet's eyes. "Hee hee, you must read!"

"I hate technobabble," Jet sighed.

Akiyama District:

Gothic Slam was a cramped, industrial space, which, Christian knew, was attributable to the fact that, once upon a time, it had been a machine shop. Someone with a decided sense of irony had decided to convert the shop into a club catering towards retro-heavy metal, and Christian supposed it fit. The club was laid out with a raised level that surrounded the murderous "mosh pit", which could get ugly sometimes. At present, three hundred or so gang bangers were on the floor, basically beating the hell out of each other to the music of a band that called itself Pale Deviant, five denim and leather clad youths banging out songs learned from ancient MP3s. It was a hell of a place to conduct business at, which was exactly the point. He and Dancer had taken a table that afforded them a view of the entire sweep of the "upper" level-actually, you entered the club at a higher level and descended into the pit-and were waiting for someone to come. Afterglow, Misawa, Esperanza…someone would show up and accelerate the game. Dancer was watching the band, bobbing her head up and down in an almost ritualistic motion; Christian looked down and saw that she was carrying a gun, one of those cheap nine millimeters that Bad Brad sold out of the back of his pawnshop, jammed into the waistband of her leather pants. He looked around and saw Fury, who'd recruited about five members of the Nihilists to serve as security, and none of them looked as if they had been around long. Must think it'll be bloody, Christian thought.

Dancer leaned over and said "Why bring Misawa into it, Painful? It's too risky."

"I don't disagree with you, love. But the problem is a question of code conflicts. I wrote Twist using my programming language, but that language, thanks to my contract, is based on Afterglow source code. It will never work as well outside of the Afterglow system. If Afterglow does not buy it, it will not work."

"So that's why you entertained other offers," Dancer said knowingly. "To draw them out."

"And for alternate funding. The money I received from both Misawa and Esperanza did not go into the gang, my dear." He noticed movement at the entrance and saw a Japanese man in an immaculately tailored grey suit, followed by three men in almost cliched black suits and sunglasses. "Bodyguard fashion 101," he said to himself. He caught Fury's eye and nodded at the newcomers, who could only be the party from Misawa-the bouncers had orders to not let anyone in who was not in a gang that could not present Misawa corporate ID-and Fury nodded. "Game on, Dancer." She took a deep breath and got ready for whatever was to come.

The Japanese man walked up to them and said, in a tone that barely carried over the tumult of the band; "I am Kobashi, Mr. Misawa's representative in this matter. He has briefed me on the specifics of your business with him." Kobashi indicated the table with a wave of his arm "Might I have a seat, Mr. Barrett?"

"You might…but the goons keep standing. I like them where they're at right now." Kobashi took the seat directly opposite of Christian, his guards flanking his seat. "Very good. So you know why you're here?"

"Mr. Misawa contracted you to serve as a mole within Project Twist, to hand your data over to us in sufficient time for us to match Afterglow's product. Yet many things that he has heard disturb Mr. Misawa. He has heard that you have disappeared from Afterglow's sight, and that you are rumored to be in contact with criminal organizations."

"I was of the opinion that industrial espionage was illegal, Mr. Kobashi. Be careful what aspersions you cast. I have completed Twist, Mr. Kobashi. It has a sensory effect of 99.967% on a human mind within a VR dataspace. And it is as of now on the open market."

Kobashi considered this. "This does not conform with Mr. Misawa's plans."

"Like I give a fuck." Christian tossed a computer disc across the table, delighting in the startled expressions that crossed the faces of the bodyguards. "Twist is in the Afterglow networks, uploaded to their VR server but not yet released. I hacked a few VR systems in order to send a few users to Twist, and two people downloaded it. That disc contains an overview of the project and the user profiles of the two souls that are currently addicted to Twist. Take that to Mr. Misawa and see what he can do with it." He snarled ferally at Kobashi. "Or does that not conform to Mr. Misawa's plans?"

The _Bebop_:

"Hold up," Jet said, exasperation in his voice, "You're saying that this guy invented a virtual drug?"

Ed shook her head. "No, Edward did not-the file did." She gave Jet a look that seemed to convey how out of touch with the universe in a millisecond. "He made a program that tells the mind that it feels silly-goofy-a drug emulator."

Jet could not believe that was possible, but it was true. Project Twist was a black project designed to create a program that simulated the effect of a mildly addictive chemical on the human brain. The possibilities were staggering-you could work Twist into the source code of an Afterglow VR web site and unconsciously addict someone into only going there. "My god, this is monstrous."

"He's very naughty-naughty," Ed agreed. "Will he be punished?"

"Let's hope so-I need to talk to Spike, fast." He picked up his hand held communicator and called Spike's frequency, yet after a few moments, it became apparent that Spike was not answering. "Goddamnit," he swore.

Ed covered her hands with her mouth. "Ooh, Jet was naughty-naughty too."

Akiyama District, Gothic Slam:

It was not that Spike would not answer Jet; he could not hear the tone coming from his handheld.

He and Faye were standing at the end of a short line of people in the colors of various gangs, directly below an industrial sized speaker blasting out heavy metal music at an insane volume. Spike remembered the space trucker, VT, who had blasted this genre of music at him and Faye once, and the experience had not gotten better with repeated exposure. Faye pulled the red jacket that she wore wrapped around her closer and complained "Can't they turn this noise down?"

"And ruin the lovely ambiance?" Spike asked. They had reached the head of the line, where a doorman and two muscular bouncers blocked the way. "You're going to let us in," Spike began.

"Oh, really?" the doorman, who carried an electronic notepad, said. "Well, tonight we had a pretty short guest list and those guys are already here, so bugger off."

Spike did not move. "This is Red Dragon business boys. I'm not going back and telling my bosses some low rent door jockeys got in my way."

The doorman looked nervous at the mention of the most powerful criminal organization in the solar system, but did not move aside. "I have my orders, sir," he replied.

Spike nodded and turned to go. "All right. I'm sure that Vicious won't mind to hear that either." He felt like spitting out the name of his most hated rival, the savage cutthroat whose name, he hoped, would open the door. The doorman turned an interesting shade of pale and stepped aside. "That's better, boys. Glad to keep things on a good footing." Spike slouched past the doorman and the bouncers, Faye following with an impish wave.

"That was an interesting approach," Faye shouted into Spike's ear, the volume of the music and the press of the crowd equally oppressive. Spike ignored her, his eyes scanning the club. It took him only one sweep to find what he was looking for. "There's our boy. Table in the back next to the girl, talking to the suits." Faye looked and saw Barrett, talking earnestly to a man of Japanese descent. The men surrounding the Japanese practically screamed bodyguard based on their postures. "Hmm. There are quite a few gang bangers paying way too much attention to our boy too," Spike continued. "Big boy at the bar, blonde crewcut. Keeps eyeing the conversation too much." Faye had already spotted him; he looked tough but young. "Best to not waste this opportunity. Mind going over to blondie and getting his attention?"

"Why don't you do it?" 

Spike grinned. "I ain't got the chest for it Faye. Just go over there and do something that will get the gang bangers looking at him." Spike made his way into the crowd before Faye could protest. She looked over at the blond gang member and decided to take out her frustrations on him. She shouldered her way through the crowd, realizing as she did that these guys were serious amateurs. They were set up to keep non-gang members out of here, but they aren't giving me and Spike a lick of attention. She slid up to the bar beside of the blond and, in a calculated, sexy voice, called to the bartender, "Excuse me, but could I have something…wet to drink?"

The blond turned and, while certainly giving her an admiring stare, did not seem too happy to see her. "Miss? You aren't supposed to be in here, you know?"

Faye batted her eyelashes at him. "Really? Now why can't little old me be in here? Dontcha…like girls?"

"Ah…that isn't it, miss, you see…"

Faye was rather fond of keeping people off balance, and she did so here. "Oh, really…I see. You're just like all the others, are you?" She clenched her fists and held then up in front of her face. "All of you insufferable bastards…you're all just like him!"

The blond took a step back, his ire clearly rising. "Now, look you little…"

Faye did not give him a chance to finish his sentence; completing the illogic of the past half-minute, she hauled off and punched him in the nose, driving him backwards. Surprisingly, a cheer rose up from the people nearest them, as if a fight breaking out was entertaining. The blond waded forward and ate a knee to the stomach followed up by a roundhouse right that would have floored a super heavyweight. To his credit he did not fall, and Faye felt the sudden press of weight on her back as someone grabbed her from behind. She saw in the mirror behind the bar that it was a rail thin youth with some sort of tattoos on his face; she stomped on one of his feet with the heel of her boot, hard enough that she heard bone snap, and when his grip loosened she threw him, over the shoulder, at the blond. She saw a flurry of activity in the corner that Barrett was in and hoped it was Spike getting their man. Then more bodies headed her way and Faye got back to work.

Christian had convinced Kobashi to convey his offer to Misawa when the roof caved in.

He had noticed the woman, a very attractive one with a figure to die for in a pair of short yellow shorts and a matching top, slide up beside of Fury, but Kobashi had been making the usual promises of prompt response that the average corporate toady made and he had paid it little heed. But when the woman started to rather expertly clean Fury's clock, it had gained his attention in record time. "Mr. Kobashi, it appears that we will have to continue this business elsewhere." Kobashi and his guards turned and noticed the brawl, and you did not have to read minds to know that all three smelled trouble. Christian got to his feet, Dancer at his side, and started to head for the side of the bar, where he had a deal with the owners to use the service exit as an escape route…and that was when the tall, lanky man appeared from seemingly nowhere and grabbed him, an arm going around his throat, the cold steel of a gun pressed against his neck. "Normally, I don't like making plans up as I go but in this case, I'll make an exception," the man said.

Christian realized on almost an instinctive level that the man was a bounty hunter for two reasons; an Afterglow security operative would not have moved in with Misawa employees so close, and a hit man from Esperanza would have shot on sight. Thinking quickly, he shouted at the top of his lungs "Mr. Kobashi! This man has a gun!"

The three bodyguards turned towards them, and Spike swore to himself as Barrett worked his way out of his grip with a well timed elbow. Spike doubted that the guards would listen to reason as they all produced rather wicked looking machine pistols. "Well, fuck," he remarked.

All three opened fire at a range of less than twenty feet, but Spike was moving, the high speed bullets chasing him as the first screams and shouts of full-fledged panic broke out. Spike dove over the bar, bullets gouging the surface of the wood. Spike popped his head up and saw that the gunfire had turned the crowd into a rioting mob, and various souls trying to escape were interfering with the bodyguards as they tried to close on him. Spike put his Jericho 941 away and threw himself over the bar, catching the first guard with a kick that loosened teeth. The second raised his gun but had no clear shot: Spike shoved the man he had kicked into the second man, then rolled aside as the third raised his gun and fired, emptying his magazine. Spike closed the difference between them in a heartbeat and threw a punch into the guard's stomach that crumpled him. Spike looked around wildly and saw that Barrett and his girl had gone over the railing around the higher level of the club and into the swirling mass of humanity that was in front of the stage. Spike ran to the railing and thought about following, but realized that by the time he got through that crowd, Barrett would be far away, and Spike would probably have taken a hell of a beating. Spike, amazingly, grinned. "You win round one, kid. But there's always round two."

Faye ran up to him, breathing hard. "Don't tell me you let him get away?" she panted. "Used some of my best moves for nothing."

Spike looked over his shoulder, where the bodyguards were all rising to their feet, none looking all that happy. "Don't worry, Faye. Plenty of guys left to go around." He sighed. "I hate making up plans as we go."

To be continued…


	2. Part 2

Cowboy Bebop: Amused to Death

Part Two:

(Cowboy Bebop and its characters are c) 2000/2001 Sunrise Studios. This story is set between Session 14 "Bohemian Rhapsody" and Session 15, "My Funny Valentine")

Akiyama District:

It had started with a hack.

Afterglow had always prided itself on having the most secure databases in the system, protected by 4096-bit encryption that was, in practice, unbreakable. Christian Barrett had been taught, during his elementary school days in Tharsis City on Mars, that trying to determine a 4096-bit encryption key, even using the best technology available to the common computer user, was a task equivalent to counting all the grains of sand in a Martian desert by hand...oh, in theory it could be done, but in practice it would take several life times. Even the best military encryption software could be in theory defeated by the vast amount of permutations possible in a 4096 bit key. It was, his teacher had said, impossible.

Barrett had decided to prove him wrong.

It had taken Barret five years, writing computer programs of such complexity for a child that had he so chosen he could have gained admittance to any school of higher learning anywhere in the solar system, to determine that his teacher was right...conventional means would not allow him to crack a 4096 bit key. He had already selected Afterglow as his target simply because he had found only three databases on Mars that had that level of security, and two were out of the question. Hacking the Martian Defense Force system was so...so cliché, even to a thirteen year old would be hacker and aspiring gang banger...and hacking the Red Dragons was akin to a death sentence...so Afterglow was it. The problem was, he was uncertain of just how to do it...until one day, when he and his long estranged parents had gone on a trip to Ganymede to visit relatives. And as the ship had passed into the Gate, it occurred to Barrett that someone had already written an algorithm that could deal with the complexities of any number theory in existence...namely, the programs that monitored the Gates themselves, that punched holes through hyperspace and made rapid transit possible from planet to planet and moon to moon. This did not solve Barrett's problem...rather, it created new ones, because the gate system, despite a recent incident involving toll gate theft, one quickly covered up by the powers that be, was more heavily protected than any database in the solar system. Barrett pondered this problem for a year as he established himself as a radical hacker, his programs traded at warez sites across the solar system and used to do everything from crack trial downloads of programs (cracking commercial programs was stupidly easy, and Barrett tended to write about ten of those programs a day to simply warm up) to commit industrial espionage. Then one day, he had another revelation, one that allowed him to crack the 4096 bit problem in less than five months.

Earth was a hacker's paradise, simply because after the Gate accident, the whole infrastructure of the planet had come apart. Floating around the shattered dataspace of Earth was more information than one could imagine, if one merely knew where to look. Barrett crafted an intrusion program that was designed to search for any records of the research that had gone into the gates and retrieve it. He had launched the search and had expected to wait days or weeks...instead, he only waited three hours before the program returned from its hunt with over 150 gigabytes of data on the gate project, culled from a PC that was still connected via a high speed connection to the old Earth internet, its security firewalls no match for Barrett's program. Two weeks of searching that data had finally given him the framework to build his 4096 bit key cruncher, and another month of coding and debugging brought him to the point where, at last, he was ready.

The program that he wrote was based upon the guidance program for the gates, the actual system that calculated positions in five dimensions (the three of so called real space plus the two practical dimensions of length and width within the extradimensional space that was the gate system moved ships through.) The numbers involved were far more complex than anyone could ever imagine, so much so that the gate project had invented virtual fractal number generators to handle the actual calculations. All that Barrett did was re-write the code so instead of searching for a safe three-dimensional coordinate through five dimensions to deliver a ship to, it sought the "safe" code combination in the encryption key. He had kept the same imperative for the program, but had altered its focus. And much to his shock, it had worked. Christian Barrett had hacked the unhackable.

And had gotten caught.

An Afterglow corporate security tac team had picked him up off the street in front of his favorite arcade two weeks later while a second team had burst into his home and confiscated all his computer hardware and software. Martian law tended to be written to suit corporate interests, so the fact that he was a teen and about sixteen long-standing laws dealing with search and seizure was conveniently forgotten. Barrett had feared the worst, that Afterglow would simply make him disappear...so he was astonished beyond belief when a junior executive entered his holding cell a week after his arrest and had offered him a job.

It amused him to read his public jacket from Afterglow, the one that claimed he was only twenty in order to emphasize his "child genius" status (he was in fact twenty three, a thing that only five people in Afterglow and Toxic Dancer, sleeping next to him in their room at the Nihilist HQ, knew) that claimed he had been discovered in school as a child prodigy. In fact, the program that he had written that the public files spoke of was his intrusion program, and Afterglow had decided that having someone such as him on their side was more profitable than burying him in an unmarked grave in the Martian desert. He had cracked Afterglow, and the hacker world knew it, and sooner or later someone else would figure out what he had done. The junior exec had explained that Afterglow wished to have the person who'd cracked them on their side...and had also explained that the unmarked grave was his only other option. Based on that, he'd accepted the job, and that had led him to first the VR simsense project, and then, to the darker, blacker project that was Twist.

Now hacking Afterglow wasn't as hard as it used to be...Barrett would be amused if he knew the ease that Edward had hacked their core databases the previous night (and would not be all that shocked if lines of his original key cruncher code were somewhere in Edward's Green Grin; things tended to take a life of their own on-line.) but he was still working off the fruits of that effort, so many years ago. Barrett rolled out of bed, considering what had happened the night before with Kobashi and the bounty hunters (who, according to the rather bruised and humbled Silent Fury, had dealt a decent beating on Kobashi's guards before hauling ass themselves) and deciding that it had all been good. _Chaos is a good thing, _he thought as he went to his laptop and booted it up, _if only because it will get Herron to finally acknowledge this situation as being at least a public relations disaster. _Barrett went to his e-mail program and found that Dancer had used his comp last, probably after he'd fallen asleep, since her account name was the one that came up. On a whim, he logged on as her and checked her sent mail; it was all harmless, forwards of stupid jokes and chain letters to her friends. Smiling, he went to his account and checked his encrypted mail: he had one mail. Barrett set one of his decoders to work on it and turned to watch Dancer sleep; she was fascinating to watch asleep...admittedly, most women with her figure in the nude were interesting to watch, but...

The codebreaker finished its work and spat out the decoded e-mail, which brought a smile to his face; things were still going fairly well.

****

To: Barrett

From: Kobashi

Apologies for the issues that complicated the meeting; I place them at the feet of your good friend Keith. My associates continue to have confidence that our business can be completed, but be advised that a sum of 30 millions woolongs has become an issue. Please advise on this issue.

Frowning now, Barrett went to check the bounty hunter sites, and discovered that, yes, the bounty on his head had risen to a full thirty million...which was actually a bit of a shock. _Herron can't think that his competitors won't know that putting a bounty like that on my head is a sign that something is terribly wrong at Afterglow; what is he thinking?_

Whatever he was thinking, Barrett knew that the endgame was coming. He sent an e-mail in reply to Kobashi, not wanting to take the time to use the private dataspace that he had normally used for contacting the representatives of Misawa, setting up the meeting that would hopefully, finally draw Herron out, then shut the computer down. He dressed in his gang colors just as Dancer arose, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. "How's it going?" she asked him.

"I'm worth ten million more. But Misawa is still interested." He sat down on the bed beside of her and kissed her. "Hopefully it will end tonight."

Dancer frowned. "Herron raised the bounty?"

"Yes. But bounty hunters, even with last night's interruption by them, aren't important. Herron surrendering to my demands is. What am I missing?"

Before Dancer could answer, Silent Fury burst into the room, the paleness of his face drawing attention to the black eye that he'd gained the night before at Gothic Slam. "Painful, we got trouble. Esperanza is on the way...his limo was spotted by a couple of our street rats entering the district."

__

I knew that telling the gang's paid street informants to keep an eye out for Esperanza was a wise move, Barrett thought. "I'll assume he isn't coming to talk, then."

Fury surprised him. "He's coming alone. No escorts, no one following him. He's coming alone."

Barrett grinned. "Well, this is an interesting complication. Shall we see what he wants, then, Fury?" He rose to his feet. "And allow dear Dancer here the chance to dress unseen?" He strode from the room, hearing the converted warehouse come alive with the songs of gang members preparing for war. He personally doubted that it would come to that...at least, not yet.

The _Bebop:_

"Well, at least you actually saw him," Jet remarked to Spike.

Spike shot Jet what he hoped was a dangerous glare and returned to what he had been doing, which was cleaning his guns. He hadn't had a need to use them last night at Gothic Slam, but he had a feeling that next time...and there would be a next time, he knew...he would need them. The brawl with the bodyguards had not lasted long before they had realized that staying there would implicate their charge in whatever business he was in with Barrett and had left. _Corporate courage,_ Spike thought, _you gotta love it_. "That's what happens when you don't plan, Jet," he replied. "Next time we'll do better."

"I'm not sure you want to try again, Spike. Barrett's into some seriously heavy shit."

"That thought _had_ occurred to me, Jet."

"I'm sure it did. Me and Edward worked his background like you asked...it's pretty ugly."

Spike reassembled one of his two Jericho 941s and worked the action to see if he'd put it back together correctly. "How ugly? Fall out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down ugly?"

"About. Afterglow had Barrett develop a virtual drug for them, a program that simulates the effects of an addictive substance on the human brain. It's pure code, the kind of thing that Afterglow can use in the source code of every site that is VR-compatible. They can addict on-line users to coming only to their sites...it makes subliminals look tame."

"And that's what Barrett is trying to sell?"

Jet nodded. "He destroyed every bit of his research and took off for Akiyama District and has been trying to sell it back to Herron ever since. I've seen the e-mails to Herron, and those to representatives of Toshiaki Misawa, the chief rival that Afterglow has on Mars, and someone named Esperanza."

"He's still alive?" Spike said wonderingly. 

"You know him?"

"I know of him. He's a small fry mobster, the kind that the Red Dragons keep around just to keep things interesting for them. He must have heard 'drug' and thought he had a way to make some money. He's always been a bit ambitious for a small fry...I'm amazed he's still alive."

"At any rate, that's where things stand. Christian Barrett has the most dangerous computer program ever written, and two mega-corporations and a mobster trying to buy it from him. That's not worth twenty million."

"Thirty million," Faye said, sweeping into the room. Following her was Edward, who was rather gravely imitating Faye's way of walking. "I just checked. Our little bountyhead is now worth thirty million woolongs."

"What?" Jet frowned. "This doesn't make any sense. Herron jacking up the bounty is a red flag to his competition that something weird is going on here."

"Who cares?" Faye offered. "All I see is more money for us to collect when we catch him."

Edward gave up her imitation of Faye and bounded over to her computer, fitting her goggles over her head in one swift motion. Spike looked away from her to Jet and Faye. "Jet's right. Something very odd is going on here...Herron could have bought the work back ages ago. Why risk it getting out into the world out of his control?"

"Do we walk away?" Jet asked.

Spike stood and stretched. "And let something like this happen? That isn't very noble of you, Jet."

"Since when are you noble?" Faye asked Spike as he slouched past her.

"I have my moments, Faye. Few and far between, admittedly, but I do."

"So what now?" Jet asked.

"We try to find what Barrett's next move is," Spike replied, "and get there before he sells the damned program...and see what the street has to say about this. Something just seems wrong about all of this." Spike wandered towards the kitchen area. "As soon as I find something to eat."

"You forget which ship you're on, Spike?" Faye asked with a wry grin.

Akiyama District:

Barrett had to give Esperanza credit; he had guts. Brains optional, but guts nonetheless.

The limo that pulled to a stop in front of the converted warehouse was designed to resist most small arms fire and probably wired to prevent people from bouncing surveillance lasers off the windows...in short it was just the thing to survive a vendetta against the Red Dragons. That would not carry Esperanza far in Akiyama District, where you could, for the right price, find almost anything. Standing on the roof of the warehouse were two of Fury's most trusted boys, armed with a military surplus anti-tank weapon, one designed to peel back the armored layers of a modern tank and kill everyone inside with kinetic energy. The limo was strictly no contest, Barrett thought. He and five members of the gang stood on the stairs in front of the warehouse, with every line of sight that a sniper could use controlled by the gang. The driver, a hulking brute in a grey three-piece suit, got out, walked around to the back, and opened the door for Esperanza. He was a thin, grey haired man, sixty years old and looking ten years older than that due to the life he had chosen to live, of going against the Red Dragons on their home turf. He looked up at Barrett and the younger man suddenly recalled that he had no idea what Esperanza's first name was. "What brings you to my lovely home, Mr. Esperanza?" Barrett asked.

"Disappointment," Esperanza called. "I make an investment, I expect to see a return on it. Yet I see you trying to deal with these suits, and not me. I find it curious."

"Aren't you polite?" Barrett replied. "I set a sum for purchasing the product from me, and you failed to meet it." _You just don't need to know that any price you set would be inadequate, old fool, _he thought.

Esperanza was clearly uncomfortable discussing this sort of business in public, yet to his credit, he pressed on. "I came here, alone, as a gesture of good faith, to talk to you. I know that your product is better suited to corporate use, but I can move your product to users that have no patience with the corporate nets." _Hmm, who told you what to say old man? One of your so- called technical advisors?_ "What do you say, boy?"

"I'd say that calling me 'boy' is not a very wise way to gain my approval." Barrett pointed down the street that the limo had driven up. "Now why don't you go back to keeping your ass covered from the Dragons and leave me alone?"

Esperanza, to his credit, never dropped his polite veneer, even if inside he had to be seething. "Do you really think a man like Keith Herron will let you complete this kind of deal? He'll squash you like a bug."

"Most likely," Barrett replied. "But a man can dream." He turned and walked back towards the door. "If you return to Akiyama District, Esperanza, you will most likely die."

"That is your final word, then?" Esperanza asked.

"Does the job for me," Barrett said, and walked back into the warehouse, the picture of the perfect young wise ass. _That should have planted all the seeds I needed to have planted, _Barrett thought. Esperanza would likely drive away from Akiyama district in a fury, planning his eventual revenge against the man that had dared to balk him...planning in fact to kill him. _Off hand, I'd say that went well._

He looked up and saw Dancer standing at the head of the stairs that led to their room, dressed in an outfit that was best described as being gothic schoolgirl. _If she wants to stay dressed, she needs to stay out of outfits like that._ He grinned at her and gave her a thumb's up. "Everything's going well," he told her. She nodded and bounced cutely down the stairs, where she kissed him. "It won't be long now," he added.

"I hope not, " she replied, burying her face in his chest. "I hope not."

"Why am I not surprised to see you?" Donna asked Spike as he walked into her store.

"Erm...I'm beguiled by your charm and beauty?" he offered.

"I'll be sure to tell my husband that one, he'll love it." She leaned over the counter, her eyes sparkling. "You and your fan club made quite a mess last night down at Gothic Slam," she said.

"You are tied into the street, aren't you? Made the right choice coming here, then." Spike leaned up against the counter and cut to the heart of the matter. "What are we missing, Donna?" When he had told Jet and Faye of his intention to ask Donna her opinion of the situation, neither had been too terribly impressed by the idea. Spike knew better. In her youth, no one, no one, had been more connected to how the street worked for hackers, and he doubted she had lost those skills. "We know what Barrett's trying to sell and we know to who. So why do I feel like there's a piece missing somewhere?"

"You know about Twist?"

Spike's eyes widened. "You mean you know?"

Donna giggled. "Of course I do, silly. Everyone knows Barrett's trying to sell a black project VR program he developed for Afterglow. The amount of noise he's making about it, you can't help but know what he's doing."

Spike thought about it. "Is that why there's such a big bounty on his head? Herron wants to silence him?"

Donna shook her head. "Spike, don't think like a bounty hunter, or a gangster, or even a hacker. Think like a businessman. Who does it benefit for Herron to let something like this happen? And more importantly, why did he let it happen?"

"And you're saying that you know?"

"No. But none of this makes any sense unless Herron somehow benefits from it. If Herron wanted Barrett back, he would be back. If Herron wanted Twist back, he would have Twist back...he has that much power. There has to be a reason why Herron has let this go on in the public eye." She poked Spike hard in the chest with one finger. "You figure it out."

Before Spike could ask her another question, a couple, elderly and Asian, came up with their own questions in their eyes. "You have customers, my lady. I shall leave you to them...and thanks." He went to the door, already digging in a pocket for his cigarettes, when Donna called "Will it be years before I see you again?"

Spike turned and smiled at her. "You never know, do you?" And with that, he left his mind awhirl with the implications of what Donna had revealed to him. Behind, Donna set to selling her customers a second hand PDA, al the while thinking _No, cowboy, I'll never see you again. Goodbye, Spike._

The _Bebop:_

Getting Edward to return to a subject that she had already solved, Jet knew, was problematic at best.

To her, hacking information about Barrett was a done deal, and something best to be avoided. The trick was to ask her to solve an old problem in a way that seemed to be new. It had taken Jet a while to think of the angle, and finally, he'd hit on it. He asked her to monitor the Afterglow system for mail from Barrett, trying to intercept a communication from Barrett to Herron, and that had worked. "Playing spy, playing spy," Edward had said in a singsong voice, and that had sent her to her computer. Now she sat in front of her computer, Ein sitting on the floor beside her, doing heaven only knew what to the Afterglow systems. Ein was looking at the computer with a look that if Jet did not know better was one of intent interest. _Damn dog can be weirder than Edward can sometimes, _he thought. Across the room, Faye was sprawled across the couch, reading an old print-styled fashion magazine. "Wow," she said in a devastatingly sarcastic tone, "this says hem lines are going back above the knee. How quaint."

"That magazine is over a year old, you know. A bounty me and Spike took brought it with her to read while we shipped her to the cops on Ganymede."

Faye looked over the top of the magazine, her eyes the only thing visible. "How do you know how old this magazine is, Jet?" she wondered, mirth in her tone.

Jet decided to ignore her. "Edward, you find anything yet?" he asked, a bit wearily.

"Edward is reading the mail!" she cried. "Lots of jokes!"

Jet frowned. "Edward, I want you to look for mail connected to this business, not jokes." _She's probably reading the kind of stupid jokes that corporate suits send to eat other all over their intranets, _he thought.

Edward scowled. "But Edward _is,_" she replied, a bit plaintively.

Before Jet could ask Edward what she meant, his handheld chimed for his attention. Thankful for the distraction, he swept the handheld up and barked "What?" into it.

"Something bothering you, Jet?" Spike asked.

"Did you find out anything?" Jet sneered in reply.

"Well, it turns out that Barrett's business is hardly private. The fact that he has Twist on the market is terribly well known. Everyone knows about it, it seems."

"That's odd." Faye said. " You'd think he'd try to keep from drawing attention."

"You'd think that...in fact, it's almost as if he _wants _Herron to become involved." Jet pondered the information that he had. "He offered Twist to Herron first, and he continues to operate in such a fashion that Herron can't help but notice it. Herron seems to be acting desperate as well, setting high bounties that will let people know how serious the situation is. Why don't I buy it?"

Edward looked up from her computer. "Twist, twist, twist, but Twist doesn't work well anywhere else."

Jet and Faye both stared at Edward in surprise. "What?" Jet finally asked.

Edward seemed shocked to be the center of such attention. "It's the _code_," she said, as if that would explain it.

"What kind of code?" Spike called, hearing the conversation through the handheld. "A pass code?"

Edward sighed. "No, sillies, the code it's made of. He wrote it from Afterglow stuffs, and Afterglow stuffs won't work as well in other places."

Jet smacked his forehead with the palm of his flesh and blood hand. "Of course. He developed it working with Afterglow! To make it their property, there would be copyrighted code in it."

"Mind explaining this to me?" Spike asked. Ten blocks away from Donna's shop, he leaned against the hull of the Swordfish and wished he'd never listened to Jet about taking this bounty.

"Corporations like Afterglow make their programmers use code sequences that are legally the property of the corporation, to keep their competition from copying the source code and using it. Twist is best designed to work with Afterglow's systems."

Realization flooded Spike. "He doesn't want to sell it to Esperanza or Misawa. He only wants to sell it back to Herron. He dealt with them only to try to bring Herron into it...only Herron won't play ball."

"But Herron wants it back," Faye argued. " He put the bounty on Barrett."

"As much noise as Barrett's making, Herron could send a corporate security team into Akiyama and carve the Nihilists apart," Spike answered. "He's playing a game...the trick is to find out what."

"And fast, before someone beats us to Barrett," Jet said. "He has to try to move Twist soon; he's put too much heat on himself. But will he sell it if it doesn't work anywhere else?"

"Who knows?" Spike asked. "We need to find where the meeting is with whomever else is going to buy it, and crash it."

Faye snickered. "Hell of a plan there, Spike."

"I guess we're still making things up as we're going along. And that has worked _so _well for us so far, hasn't it?"

"Not really," Faye admitted. 

Akiyama District:

The time had come.

Silent Fury had supervised the moving of most of the gang to the meeting place, another warehouse that Barrett had bought with money funneled from Afterglow's black ops accounts, and Kobashi had agreed to the meeting, even on such short notice. Barrett walked through the converted warehouse that had been home to him since he had left Afterglow, and remembered the good times. Mostly it had been sex with Dancer, true, but that was good enough a memory for him. It was a shame, he considered as he climbed the stairs to the room he shared with Dancer, that Herron had decided not to buy back Twist; it would force Misawa to spend millions and years of development making Twist work in their system, and Misawa might decide to take that out on him. But he found that he didn't care. After tonight, after the conflict that he had engineered went down, he and Dancer would be free to start again.

Dancer was coming out of their room as he reached the door; she had changed out of her skirt into a pair of black leather pants. The pistol that she had carried the night before was stuck down in the waistband of her pants, and she had added to her arsenal a Heckler and Koch MP-25TX machine gun, slung over one shoulder. "Don't we look lethal?" he asked.

Dancer smiled. "Well, I have a feeling that things will be really messy soon. You've invited Esperanza to land on your head, just to cover your escape from all of this."

"He was supposed to cover our escape from Herron, but Herron won't play. I wonder why. It's not like he had Twist still...the code I uploaded to test was designed to erase itself when someone downloaded it."

"Well, it don't matter, honey. We'll have all the money we need to start over again." She kissed Barrett lightly on the lips. "It'll be over soon."

"That it will," he told her, walking into their room. His laptop was on the bed...Dancer had probably been using it to e-mail her friends again, and he was pleased that he had locked away the Twist files away behind fully encrypted security. He picked up the comp and walked out of the room, headed for his destiny.

The _Bebop:_

"Meeting, meeting, meeting, I know where the meeting is!" Edward cried.

Jet and Faye appeared beside her with such speed that one could imagine that they had teleported there. Ein, who had been sleeping, looked around, wondering why people had decided to bother him then laid down to sleep again. "What meeting?" Jet asked. "Has Barrett set up a meet?" 

Edward nodded solemnly. "With someone named Kobashi, he did. Akiyama District, 112234 304th Street. It's a place that Mr. Bad Barrett owns." 

"How do you know this?" Faye asked.

Edward was typically enigmatic. "The jokes told me."

Jet did not have time for Edward's usual nonsense. "When is the meeting?" he asked her.

"14:30 Mars mean time," she replied. 

Jet groaned; the clock on the wall told the story. Barrett was meeting with Misawa's representative in thirty minutes. "Not much time to plan, is it?"

"Tell Spike about the meeting," Faye said, sprinting out of the room. "I'll meet him there!"

"Faye, wait!" Jet called, knowing it would not work. _This is not worth thirty million woolongs, not in the slightest,_ he thought. "How do you know that Barrett owns the warehouse?" he asked.

"The jokes," she insisted. "It wasn't the letters but the jokes!" Seeing exasperation on Jet's face, Edward bent over her computer. "Edward will show you!" 

Whatever Edward was going to show him, Jet decided, it had to wait. He swept up his handheld and began calling Spike, hoping that maybe Spike would decide to finally give this one up. _Nothing makes sense here, and to think, I wanted this bounty in the first place._

Akiyama District:

"Showtime," Barrett whispered.

The warehouse that he had bought, weeks ago, to serve as the meeting place (largely because he did not want to have the Nihilists' home destroyed in the end game and add them to his list of enemies) was about half the size of the one he'd lived in with the gang. Rows of crates, left unclaimed by previous users of the warehouse, lined both walls to either hand, and a catwalk ran three of the four sides of the space. Half of the Nihilists that Fury had brought to the meeting were on the catwalk; the other half stood on the floor, all waiting for the end of the affair. Barrett sat at a table in the center of the floor, Dancer at his elbow, the laptop with Twist in it in front of him. And walking across the warehouse floor, escorted by the same bodyguards that had been at Gothic Slam and by two of Fury's hand picked men, were Kobashi and another man of Asian descent who was carrying a laptop computer. _Here we go, _he thought. Kobashi and his associate came to a halt in front of him. "So, Mr. Kobashi, do you wish to make a purchase?"

Kobashi nodded. "This is my assistant, Mr. Taue. He will transfer the money that you have requested to your account once he has checked the code of your program. Once that happens, he will download the Twist code to his computer and then we can begin the process of making Twist work for us." Barrett decided to keep his best poker face on. "You did not think that we did not know that we would have to make gross alterations to the code to make it work without infringing the Afterglow copyright, did you?"

Barrett chuckled. "Well, I had hoped. I assume that the value of the program has been lessened, then?"

"Of a certainty. By, shall we say fifty percent?"

__

Lovely...time is running out and I'm reduced to haggling with a suit. "Thirty percent," he countered. "I have given you a program that cost Herron millions to develop...that's millions that you do not have to spend. That only seems fair."

Kobashi considered the offer. "Thirty five percent."

"Acceptable." He turned the laptop towards Taue, noticing that Dancer had raised her machine gun to train it on the Misawa representative. Privately, he was happy that Misawa would not be among his list of enemies after this day; Afterglow and Esperanza were bad enough. _Maybe things will work out for the best after all, _he thought.

Spike approached the warehouse that Jet had directed him to, having landed the Swordfish a decent distance away in order to keep from alerting the Nihilists that he was on the way. He had formulated a plan of sorts on the way there, although he doubted it would work; he could practically feel half of the population of Mars on the way to this meeting. _The next time that I get a bright idea like taking a corporate bounty, someone sit on me until the urge passes._ He peered around the corner of a building just down the block from the warehouse, and saw two nondescript cars, the kind that one would use if he was, say, a corporate representative who did not want to attract notice. Four of the Nihilists stood guard at the door beside of the larger roll-up doors that let trucks enter the warehouse; among them was the blond youth that Faye had beaten up the night before. Spike took a deep breath and then, true to his character, walked casually up to the door. Amazingly, and perhaps revealing exactly how amateurish the Nihilists were, Spike actually made it to the door. "Have I got a deal for you," Spike said. The four Nihilists stared at him in amazement, and Spike took advantage of their shock. He took down one to the left with a kick to the jaw that snapped the Nihilist's neck backward. Still moving, Spike dropped another Nihilist with a series of punches that the unfortunate Silent Fury could barely register. The third Nihilist managed to raise his weapon, but Spike was moving too fast to stop; he grabbed the barrel of the gun and rammed it into the boy's face (and he was only a boy, maybe sixteen years old), then spun, the machine gun leveled at Silent Fury's face. "Amateur hour is over, son," Spike told the blond. "Now take me to Barrett, fast, before the roof falls in."

The _Bebop:_

Edward was bent over her computer; her hands flying wildly as she worked the VR icon interface that she used to manipulate the dataspace. Beside of her, Jet worried, wondering if Spike and Faye were walking into their deaths. This whole case was maddening, and when he thought about it, Jet wasn't all that shocked. This had all been put together by a megalomaniac who was yet a child still, manipulating events recklessly to accomplish his goal. _If by some chance we get the bounty, _he thought, _I'm taking a very long vacation._ Suddenly, Edward shot her hands up in the air and said, "Yes! I made the jokes work!"

Edward pointed at the screen, and Jet looked, and saw to his endless amazement that an endless stream of code was scrolling up the screen. " What...what IS this, Edward?" Jet asked, terrified that he already knew what it was.

"Twist," she replied. She lay on her back and watched her feet as she waved them back and forth. "It was in the jokes that Barrett was mailing out of his computer."

"_Barrett _mailed Herron the program? That makes no sense!"

"It was Barrett's computer," Edward insisted. "It was Barrett's computer that sent the mail that told Herron where the meeting was...of course, someone else could have used his computer." Edward sat up. "I'm gonna play." She scampered away from the computer, Ein barking and following her. Behind her, Jet stared in shock at the millions of lines of code that made up Twist, and it hit him, then: _Herron has someone in the Nihilists. He's **always **had someone on the inside!_ He pulled his handheld out and called Faye, figuring that she was not yet at the meet. "Faye, Faye, please respond!" As he waited, he instructed the WipeInfo function of Edward's computer to erase what Edward had accidentally decoded, the fifteen millions lines of code that was Twist. _Edward having something like that around is far too dangerous for my liking, _Jet thought.

"I'm almost there, Jet, this had better be good!" Faye snapped.

"Herron already has Twist! Someone sent it to him in encrypted form! There's someone on the inside of all of this! _It's a set-up!"_

Akiyama District: the endgame

Taue had just finished checking the code and was simply waiting for Kobashi to give the order to transfer the money to the proper account, when the entrance door next to the freight doors opened and the bounty hunter from the night before, holding a gun to Fury's head, entered. _Man, nothing is going right here, is it? _Barrett thought. The members of the Nihilists trained their weapons on Fury and the bounty hunter, but uncertainly, clearly afraid of killing the man that they truly thought of as their leader. Kobashi's guards, recognizing the man from Gothic Slam (and probably feeling the shame of being beaten by him) immediately formed a protective shield around the two suits. "Well, now, a bounty hunter has made it to the meeting," Barrett called. "Do you wish to make a bid on Twist?"

Spike led Fury until they stood in front of Barrett and Dancer then remarked "No, I'm here to save your sorry ass. By now, I'm sure that you've made enough noise that someone will be here soon to erase you and all around you...Esperanza, most likely."

"And you can save me from that, bounty boy? How?"

Spike glared at Barrett. "Be careful who you call boy, kid. Here's my deal. I take you into custody for stealing the corporate property of Afterglow Enterprises..."

"...collect the bounty, and someone who is paid off by Afterglow kills me while I wait for trial. I'm not that dumb, bounty _boy._"

"No," Spike replied, having worked that out on the way here. "I'm certain that a company that has taken the sort of interest in your work would be more than pleased to hire the best legal protection that money can buy. You'd be on the street in minutes."

Kobashi nodded vigorously. "Indeed, we would be able to procure your legal release from prison very rapidly, if that is how it goes."

"But what about the deal?" Barrett asked. "What about Twist? Think about it, bounty boy...an entire solar system of couch potatoes, wired into the dataspace, amusing themselves to death with 10,000 channels of mindless pap and billions of web sites all over the network, and underlying all of them, a program designed to addict those users to any location that Twist is written into the code of. Think of the power a person who controlled that would have!"

"No one has any power if they're dead," Spike replied. "Face it, kid, I'm the best chance you have right now."

Barrett looked up at Dancer, who was chewing on her lower lip, deep in thought. _Maybe I came up with too complicated a plan, trying to play so many people against the middle. I was so blinded by wanting to make Herron buy it that I did not see any other way. Maybe there is another way..._

If there was another way, someone chose that moment to make certain that he decided it.

With a roar of its engine, a black sedan burst through the freight doors, smashing them aside like paper. To the credit of the Nihilists, a great many of them opened fire on the car, riddling it with bullets in seconds and a rifle launched grenade finished it. Kobashi's men hurried him under cover while Barrett snatched up his laptop and began moving towards the back of the warehouse. Spike shoved Fury aside, having realized something that none of the Nihilists probably did; the car was empty. Spike dove for cover behind a line of crates just as his suspicions were confirmed and an explosion, likely shaped charges, blasted a hole in the roof above them. From above came automatic weapons fire that riddled the catwalks, tearing wide swaths in the lines of gang bangers on the catwalks. Whoever was doing this were _very _good gunmen, Spike knew; these kids were like wheat before the thresher. Bullets whined over Spike's head; he looked over the edge of his cover and found that the blond was running at him, having produced a handgun from god only knew where. Spike leveled the machine gun at him and snapped off two three round bursts. Silent Fury fell over dead, leaving Spike to say, "You picked a hell of a time to get even, asshole."

The warehouse was a storm of madness; men were lowering themselves into the warehouse through the hole in the roof, dressed in what appeared to be surplus SWAT gear, some of them being taken out by Nihilists, others, though, reaching the ground safely. Their lack of corporate insignia and their older equipment made them, in all likelihood, Esperanza's men; Afterglow's tac teams were probably as well armed as the military. Spike looked around the warehouse and saw that Barrett and his girl were making their way up the metal stairs that led to the catwalk, the girl firing her machine gun at Esperanza's men. _Gotta admire her dedication, _Spike thought. As he thought this, a group of men ran around the burning car, firing from the hip with their weapons. Spike decided that sitting here and watching would just get him killed, so he rose to his feet and sprayed the newcomers with his stolen gun, dropping three of the five. He ducked for cover again as bullets roared his way; the machine gun was empty, and he tossed it aside, drawing a 941 from under his jacket. From the sound of things, most of the Nihilists were dead, or wounded; the counter fire was lessening. _The first minute of combat is always the hardest, _Spike thought. He whirled around the edge of the crate that was his cover, and snapped off three rounds that caught one of the two men that had entered the warehouse through the front. Bullets raced towards him from the catwalk that faced him; he saw that Esperanza's men had taken over the catwalk. Kobashi and his little band were on the opposite side of the warehouse, drawing fire from above Spike, and Barrett and his girl were by a door to what had probably been the office space of the warehouse, trying to open a door. _The "Jet Black Self Improvement Plan" has gotten me killed, _Spike thought.

Just then, Spike heard the familiar bark of a Glock 30, and the last of the men at the door fell over, dead. "Spike!" Faye shouted from behind the burning car, "you dead yet?!"

"Why, Faye, do you want me to be?" he bellowed back.

"Listen, Spike, Jet told me that this is a set up..._Herron already has Twist!!!"_

Across the warehouse, having just unlocked the door to the offices of the former warehouse, Barrett's jaw dropped. _That explains it, it explains it! Herron didn't have to deal! The son of a bitch must have found it before the test run!!! Stupid, stupid, stupid!!! _He turned and told Dancer, "Don't let anyone through. I have something to take care of." He kissed her, not knowing that it would be the last time they would kiss, then he ran down a hallway towards the one office with power in the warehouse. _I took it from you once, Herron, I'll take it again!_

"So what the fuck has this been all about?!" Spike yelled.

Faye fired on the team above Spike's head before she bellowed "It hardly matters! Come on Spike, let's go!"

Spike drew a second 941 from under his jacket and shook his head. "I'm too close, Faye. This one is mine." Spike dove out from under cover and landed on his back, three of the seven men that had taken the catwalk above him in his sights. He fired both guns at once, bullets tearing through the men as if they were paper. He got to his feet just as the other four began firing on him, but he hoped that he had bought the men guarding Kobashi enough time to deal with them. Five men had been detailed to take the other catwalk, and they were approaching the stairs that led to the floor. Spike rolled forward, beneath the stairs, and aimed both guns over head "You clowns always were second rate," Spike snarled, and emptied both guns. Taken from beneath, Spike's rounds struck all five of the men in the legs, wounding three in the legs and killing the other two outright. Spike reloaded both guns and saw that Faye and Kobashi's men had engaged the last group of Esperanza's men. Perhaps four minutes had passed. Spike rose and ran for the door that Barrett and his girl had gone through, knowing that he had mere minutes to get a hold of Barrett before the police, or failing that more of Esperanza's men, arrived.

In an office that only had a card table and a folding metal chair for furnishings, Barrett logged into the Afterglow system and prepared to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. He pulled up the search and destroy program that he had used to clear the Afterglow databases of Twist when he had first decided to steal it and set it to running. _I'll take Twist back from you, you bastard, _he thought.

"Christian, honey, what are you doing?" Dancer called from the door.

"You heard what that woman said. Herron has Twist. I'm going to run the search and destroy program and take it back. And didn't I tell you to watch the other door?"

"You did." Toxic Dancer raised her pistol and trained it on him. "But it took me quite some time to return Twist to Mr. Herron, and I'd rather not have to do it again."

Barrett's blood went cold as he turned around and looked at her. "What did you say?"

"You heard me. I've been your shadow with the gangs since you became associated with the Nihilists, and Mr. Herron assigned me to regain Twist."

Barrett's mind made a logical leap in desperation. "The e-mails, last night. And my laptop had been moved this afternoon. You sent Twist to Herron."

Dancer nodded. "Yes, I did. Encrypted into the source of my e-mail forwards. And having done that, I have only one part of my assignment left." She thumbed the hammer back on her handgun. "For what it's worth, kid, you were pretty good in the sack. But I'll be glad to get back to acting my age and hanging out with a better class of people."

__

Afterglow Security, undercover operative. All of this was a set up, bit they weren't setting me up...

"Sally..." he began, trying to reason with her.

Dancer fired twice, both bullets striking Barrett in the face. "My name isn't Sally, either," she told him. She walked across the room and bent to check his pulse; Christian Xian Barrett was quite dead. "Well, another job done," she said, standing, meaning to deactivate the search and destroy program and take the actual Twist code with her. She was thinking about the bonus that her superiors had promised her for this mission, which she had been on for the better part of three years, first by getting into the Nihilists when Barrett had decided to start spending his free time with them, then becoming his lover when he had stolen Twist. _Foolish genius, _she thought, _you should have just defected to Misawa instead of creating such an insanely complex plan. _She looked at the laptop and saw that the search was nearly complete; Barrett was a lot of things but he was a hell of a programmer. She lifted a hand to stop the program and that was when Spike said from the doorway, "Killed by a woman, huh? I can sympathize."

Dancer turned and regarded the bounty hunter, who was aiming his gun at her with practiced care. She saw no point in hiding the truth from the bounty hunter now, since he would not walk out of here either. "Afterglow Security, my dear bounty hunter. Your bounty is dead...you may go now."

Spike smiled at her. "Not before you tell me the point of this. I've nearly gotten killed and lost 30 million woolongs in the past ten minutes. I deserve something for that."

"Fair enough. We could have had Twist back ages ago, but Barrett insisted on this far too complex scheme. It was decided that we would use this to create a situation where Misawa, our main competition, would be caught engaged in corporate espionage against Afterglow, dealing with a style gang of all things, and possibly even the Esperanza gang."

"I see. And the bounty on Barrett?"

"Was to make Misawa believe that Afterglow was truly worried that they would lose Twist. I guess you would call it verisimilitude. You have done very well, my friend, but if you wish to escape unharmed, you had best go. By now the police and our hand picked media agents are on the way, and I know you'd prefer not to answer any of their questions."

Spike sighed. "Easy come, easy go," he said, shrugging his shoulders. "Maybe I should get into another line of work." He turned to leave, and that was when she moved, lifting her gun and aiming it at his back...

...and Spike spun, dropping to one knee, firing his gun five times, working the rounds up her torso. She fell over, blood bubbling from her mouth, one of the bullets having pierced her lung. "How...?" she asked, life living her.

"I don't trust women," he told her as she died. In truth, he had seen her movement in her reflection in the window of the office door, but that had sounded better. Spike walked over to the laptop and read what was displayed on the monitor:

****

All code sequences matching search criteria file: #Twist located

Overwrite sequence engaged and ready

Do you wish to proceed?

Spike let his fingers run across the keyboard of the laptop, thinking about what kind of trouble that a man could get into, destroying something so valuable to Afterglow and to so many others, and wondering how much money this code was worth to the corporate world...probably a lot more than thirty million woolongs. Then Spike rather resolutely pressed the enter key. 

****

Files deleted.

Spike read.

Then he turned the pistol in his hand and smashed the casing of the laptop open, pulling the hard drive from the case. He laid it on the tabletop and struck it with the butt of the gun until nothing was left but splinters. "I've been in trouble before," Spike said, "and I'm getting used to being broke." Then he left the office, meaning to collect Faye, and to return to the _Bebop_ and tell Jet that _this _was why he hated corporate bounties.

****

...see you space cowboy

Afterword:

Okay, I'm sure that some of you might be wondering right now: why did it take him NINE months to finish this fanfic?

Well, the answer is a bit long, but it goes something like this; my normal fanfic bread and butter is video game fan fiction, and in July, when I wrote the first part of _Amused to Death, _I was tired of writing that kind of stuff, for personal reasons. I chose Bebop because it was, and still is, my favorite anime, and the first part wrote itself in a heartbeat. I posted it, and found, to my amusement, that I had the only Bebop fic on FF.net...and I would for the next five or so months. So it took a bit for the story to get noticed, and after a while, I returned to writing Final Fantasy fanfics under another name, ultimately opening a web site devoted to it, and the Bebop fic faded. But, eventually, enough Bebop fics came along that the show got it's own section at FF.net, and I moved _Amused _there, and the reviews started coming in. I slowly began to believe I might be able to finish the fic, but it wasn't until recently that I rediscovered the story's rhythm (trust me, a nine month break in any piece of fiction is not easy to overcome) and now, here it is. I don't know how good it is, but at least it's done. I'd like to thank anyone who has read this and asked where the rest of it was for waiting patiently for me to rediscover this story and finish it.

This part of _Amused to Death _is dedicated to the real Donna, who built the web site I mentioned earlier to you and since the writing of the first part has become as big a Bebop fan as me. Her support of my fanfic career through the building of my site and her friendship is invaluable to me; thanks hun! And hopefully, if I ever write another Bebop fic, it won't take almost a year to finish! 

__ __


End file.
